With widespread concern for increased alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a pressing need to examine changes in young adults' alcohol use and to identify antecedents of increased use. We tested the hypothesis that self-reported changes in alcohol use during the pandemic (frequency, quantity, heavy episodic drinking) would relate to perceptions of peers' changes in alcohol use. In April of 2020, 507 college students self-reported changes in their alcohol use and perceived changes in use for typical students at their university (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerceptions of friends' approval of drinking behaviors (i.e., injunctive drinking norms) play a central role in shaping college students' alcohol use behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Recent discoveries have identified shortened telomeres and related mutations in people with pulmonary fibrosis (PF). There is evidence to suggest that androgens, including danazol, may be effective in lengthening telomeres in peripheral blood cells. This study aims to assess the safety and efficacy of danazol in adults and children with PF associated with telomere shortening.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Accurate liver segmentation is key for volumetry assessment to guide treatment decisions. Moreover, it is an important pre-processing step for cancer detection algorithms. Liver segmentation can be especially challenging in patients with cancer-related tissue changes and shape deformation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present recount3, a resource consisting of over 750,000 publicly available human and mouse RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) samples uniformly processed by our new Monorail analysis pipeline. To facilitate access to the data, we provide the recount3 and snapcount R/Bioconductor packages as well as complementary web resources. Using these tools, data can be downloaded as study-level summaries or queried for specific exon-exon junctions, genes, samples, or other features.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMeasurements of cilia function (beat frequency, pattern) have been established as diagnostic tools for respiratory diseases such as primary ciliary dyskinesia. However, the wider application of these techniques is limited by the extreme susceptibility of ciliary function to changes in environmental factors e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDebate exists on the usefulness of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) testing in pediatric patients due to the perceived low incidence of myocardial injury and lack of data concerning its efficacy. We evaluated the contribution of an increased hs-cTnT above the 99th percentile upper-reference limit (URL) to clinical diagnoses made in pediatric patients presenting to the emergency department (ED). Retrospective cohort study including patients aged 0-18 years presenting to the ED from 2018 to 2020 where hs-cTnT was measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate the epidemiology and outcomes of non-ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction-cardiogenic shock (NSTEMI-CS) in the United States.
Methods: Adult (>18 years) NSTEMI-CS admissions were identified using the National Inpatient Sample (2000-2017) and classified by tertiles of admission year (2000-2005, 2006-2011 and 2012-2017). Outcomes of interest included temporal trends of prevalence and in-hospital mortality, use of cardiac procedures, in-hospital mortality, hospitalization costs, and length of stay.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of acute lower respiratory infection hospitalisations in Aboriginal infants specifically those aged <6 months. Maternally derived RSV antibody (Ab) can protect against severe RSV disease in infancy. However, the efficiency of transplacental transfer of maternal anti-RSV Ab remains unknown in Aboriginal infants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSingle-cell gene expression technologies are powerful tools to study cell types in the human brain, but efforts have largely focused on cortical brain regions. We therefore created a single-nucleus RNA-sequencing resource of 70,615 high-quality nuclei to generate a molecular taxonomy of cell types across five human brain regions that serve as key nodes of the human brain reward circuitry: nucleus accumbens, amygdala, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We first identified novel subpopulations of interneurons and medium spiny neurons (MSNs) in the nucleus accumbens and further characterized robust GABAergic inhibitory cell populations in the amygdala.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: In December 2020, CDC launched the Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program to facilitate COVID-19 vaccination of residents and staff in long-term care facilities (LTCFs), including assisted living (AL) and other residential care (RC) communities. We aimed to assess vaccine uptake in these communities and identify characteristics that might impact uptake.
Design: Cross-sectional study.
Word2vec introduced by Mikolov et al. is a word embedding method that is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success and frequent use, a strong theoretical justification is still lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNPJ Prim Care Respir Med
September 2021
Asthma is the most common chronic condition of childhood. Self-management is integral to good asthma control. This qualitative paper explores how children with asthma and their parents perceive asthma, their experience with asthma, and how they manage symptoms, preventions and medications within and outside the home.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate if facility-level vaccination after an initial vaccination clinic was independently associated with COVID-19 incidence adjusted for other factors in January 2021 among nursing home residents.
Design: Ecological analysis of data from the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) and from the CDC's Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program.
Setting And Participants: CMS-certified nursing homes participating in both NHSN and the Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program.
Advances in next-generation sequencing have enabled the widespread measurement of microbiome composition across systems and over the course of microbiome assembly. Despite substantial progress in understanding the deterministic drivers of community composition, the role of historical contingency remains poorly understood. The establishment of new species in a community can depend on the order and/or timing of their arrival, a phenomenon known as a priority effect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prenatal exposure to air pollutants is associated with increased risk for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. However, few studies have identified transcriptional changes related to air pollutant exposure.
Methods: RNA sequencing was used to examine transcriptomic changes in blood and cerebral cortex of three male and three female mouse neonates prenatally exposed to traffic-related nano-sized particulate matter (nPM) compared to three male and three female mouse neonates prenatally exposed to control filter air.
Background: The role of insurance on outcomes in non-ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) patients is limited in the contemporary era.
Methods: From the National Inpatient Sample, adult NSTEMI admissions were identified [2000-2017]. Expected primary payer was classified into Medicare, Medicaid, private, uninsured and others.